Here's how two entrepreneurs turned turkey-feather bow ties into a real business: "I contacted Fab.com, a flash sale site that had 2 to 3 million email subscribers and begged and pleaded with them to do a flash sale with us. They finally agreed. I had professional images made for the sale and I wrote copy for every single design we had. The sales lasted 72 hours and we got 450 orders. We went from elation to Ohmigod, what are we going to do? We’ve got to make all those ties in seven days."

Do startups have to choose between being profitable and being humane? "Over a matter of days, I saw altruistic business ideas—to encourage people to provide healthy meals to low-income communities, for example, to recycle better or to help high school athletes connect with other players—altered drastically to emphasize profit to generate as much investment as possible. Ideas were quickly divorced from whatever benevolent sentiment spawned them, and instead tailored to garner insane and inaccurate valuations. I watched as one startup projected a billion dollar revenue in a few years time, even though they were just two guys with a laptop. (That startup won the competition. They’re still in business, but are well short of their billion-dollar goal.) The administrator who organized the accelerator was aghast, and wondered aloud why a seemingly harmless initiative meant to develop nascent businesses had devolved into an exercise about who could make the steepest and most daring revenue projections. But we should have seen it coming."

Payment

If you're still trying to figure out Bitcoin, don't look now but Ethereum is the new Bitcoin: "The rise of the relatively new virtual currency has been helped by a battle within the Bitcoin community over how the basic Bitcoin software should develop. The fights have slowed down Bitcoin transactions and led some people to look for alternative virtual currencies to power their businesses. Enter Ethereum."

Human Resources

California has a deal to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour: "Adam Ozimek, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, calculates that 600,000 California manufacturing jobs currently pay $15 an hour or less. He says 31,000 to 160,000 of them could be lost under the proposed agreement, depending on how responsive companies are to cost increases. California’s plan would give the governor the power to delay an increase if state job growth turns negative for a period of months or if retail sales fall over the course of a year."